Nepal, April 26 -- Don't allow more public money to be drained by this project

The massive scale of resource waste incurred by a single project, the Election Commission's electronic voting machine (EVM) endeavour, has been outlined in a recent report by this daily. The now stagnant project began with the purchase of 1.50 lakh EVMs at a cost of Tk 3,825 crore ahead of the 2018 national polls to reduce the use of paper ballots. We are now left with 1.05 lakh out-of-order EVMs, worth Tk 2,467 crore of taxpayers' money. The machines that still remain functional have only four years of their lifespan left. But even these leftover EVMs have been haphazardly stored, the bulk of them being at the lone manufacturer's (the Bangladesh Machine Tools...